Saturday, June 21, 2014

Over the last weeks my life has been shifting in to 5 gear... or maybe I was already in 5th gear and now for some reason I am just noticing it?

Between bouncing off the walls working on projects for Google X, Oakley, Make magazine, getting ready to go to Italy for Red Bull and one of the main things happening to me - MOVING TO A NEW SHOP IN BERKELEY !!!!

I will have more info about all this madness when I take a breath of air in less then a month.... I mean as an example of my life lately - its like 4 am right now and I am waiting for the CNC to finish cutting so I can take a quick nap while it runs the next parts, this is becoming more normal the more I do prototyping work, I feel like I haven't slept in years because theres too much stuff to do.

Peace and quite at 4am... well maybe... the streets of Oakland always have some odd activity going on 24/7, you hear some noises that kinda resemble a animal but it is clearly a human making those noises, I think you can figure out the rest.

One of the cool projects I forgot about that I did last month because I kicked it out so fast was these trophies for Red Bull Ride N' Style a bicycle race event they were putting on in San Francisco, the call came in to make something quick, cheap and cool looking so I fired up the computer and put my brain in to Sheet metal mode, by the time I finished that call I had a concept modeled up and emailed to Clayton at Red Bull.

Some times I get in to Autodesk Inventor and go crazy with the sheet metal...

Don't ask how my brain lays stuff out or anything like that....

I had Ryan over at SeaportStainless.com cut it up about an hour later after I had modeled it and it was on to bending up this puzzle

I love sheet metal, did I say that?

That next day...

I decided to cut up one of the Velocity prototype rims Matt had sent me long time ago because really it was my only 700c rim laying around... I may regret that later

First place with some San Francisco Action happening in the back and a mini chain in the front

Custom bent sheet metal Hub!

My mad skills with the 24k gold spray pain has hit an all time High - insert joke here

Thursday, June 5, 2014

You will be come a better machinist, fabricator or engineer attending Uncle Tom's YouTube University classes !

His tips and trips are gold !

How do I know Tom Lipton?

I started working for a company a few years ago that was developed and started by Tom and another guy Bob Switek in the San Francisco bay area.

The company was really started in the early 1990s after Bob the mechanical engineer teamed up with Tom to develop an R&D machinery company for various industries with most of it being in the vegetable industry.

Some of the wild machinery was patented as well, like a machine that cut broccoli, really a first of its kind in the broccoli production world, some of these machines still run and are being built today.

The two teamed up and built a really neat prototype company called California Vegetable Machinery, CVM for short, later the name just became CVM as more of the R&D work went toward Clorox and the tech world, the vegetable part would take a back seat.

The company is still around today and doing very well, with a very skilled team. Tom happed to be offered a job by the USA Gov. R&D Labs located in Berkeley and decided to leave CMV, that's about when I got hired in 2010 or so, just missed working with Tom by a few months. ( I was at CVM for a bit over 2 years and learned so much, vital to what I do and how I do work today)

But it was pretty fresh scar that Tom had quit when I started at CVM, so I needed to meet this Tom guy, so I tracked him down and we have been buddies since then. Its cool, not a lot of really precision mined fabricators out there willing to bounce ideas off with the experience.

Tom makes visits to my shop all the time but every so often its good to pay him a visit and so the Monkeys ( Gabe and Austin ) from my shop and I happed to call him and see if he was up for some tool trading.

it was also cool to show them Toms shop and see what projects hes up too, heres the video below